Author's Note: One Character Prompt #4 - Pride. Just moving some of the older ficbits on my journal here. Warnings: Disturbing imagery and depictions of violence. I don't go into detail, but if you have a vivid imagination (I do) it may squick you.
The battlefield seems to stretch forever, an odd trick of the mind as he knows it is only a few kilometres of beach and some adjoining fields; the fighting had never reached the city beyond, some restraint preventing either side from taking their struggle there, to where civilians waited anxiously. For Sephiroth, it was the fact that once within the confines of unfamiliar city streets and buildings his forces would be at a distinct disadvantage, but now he feels it's an unlooked-for mercy that the city remains untouched. That at least, in all of this chaos, civilians weren't killed; that they didn't see it, for the carnage is horror enough for any soldier.
There is a patch of sand fused to glass by a lightning spell: the charred twist of something in the centre suggests to him Bolt3, enough to ensure nothing human could survive. No telling if it's one of his own men or the enemy, and he doesn't think it really matters anyway. Over to the left is the blackened form of a tree, its leaves lost to fire, and the thick charcoal post beside it might have belonged to a fence. No sign of any corpses there, so perhaps somebody survived that attack, and now lies moaning in pain in one of the many medical tents set up to cope with the wounded.
Or maybe they're lying in a bag in the back of a truck, to be transported away to a waiting grave and a posthumous decoration.
Sephiroth can see movement amongst the broken corpses. There are still survivors, some more damaged than their unmoving counterparts, waiting for the medics to find them. Or some other method of relief. For a moment his hand creeps to the mastered Restore materia in his bracer, then practicality asserts itself. He is already depleted from the battle, and there's no guarantee that this will be the end of it; he doesn't dare drain himself when some trouble might yet make itself known.
Even if this makes him wonder how anyone can ever fight again.
A foolish thought. He was made to fight, has no other purpose. It always seemed enough before; it's only in the last few weeks that he has started to wonder, to question. Why are they here? If Wutai doesn't want Mako reactors built, why are they forcing them to accept it? Why is this a problem ShinRa feels the urge to solve by conquest and not by its usual combination of bribery and blackmail?
He has no option really. This brief taste of freedom, of a world outside the labs to which he is so accustomed, confused him at first. But ShinRa owns him, controls him. He thought it was his own choice to fight as well as he possibly could, but it's just like a test in the lab: he doesn't dare fail, because consequences await. The fact that he's not breathing processed, recycled air changes nothing.
At long last, Wutai is broken. Conquered. No significant resistance remains, and their high command is gone. Sephiroth has done what the company asked of him. Achieved what some thought impossible. He should be proud, and is sure that the speeches awaiting him back home will say as much. ShinRa has an eager PR department, ready to milk this for all it's worth in the media. Much will be made of his achievements.
He has reports to make, at least some of which will be used to create exhilarating thirty-second sound bites for the consumption of the ignorant public. But others will ensure that his medics have everything they need, that supplies get to the right locations, and so he must return to them.
But as he turns his back on the battlefield that is his creation, Sephiroth wonders if pride could ever be a comfort after something like this. Because what he feels is much closer to shame.